by Gregory Day
It was shortbread in the tin, ridged and buttery. Despite the strange intimacy created by her telling me the dream she was still not what you’d call overly feminine, in her workmanlike clothes and with her vague smell of iodine and creatures. The homeliness of the shortbread came as something of a surprise.
Perhaps if I’d been more resistant that day, more caustic, if I’d not needed to just sit and listen to another voice, a woman’s voice, she would have chosen other things to tell. Things she’s told me since. Like how when Nat and his bride, and the eight Brangus they’d been given by Warren Burrows as a wedding gift, had reached the bottom of the hill at Lorne the day after the wedding, he’d driven them straight onto the beach by the Erskine river mouth and cut digestible strips of kelp for them to chew on. And how, as a result, people in Lorne felt sorry for him – the poor young island groom trying to kill his odd-looking wedding cattle on seaweed – and how this sympathy made sure he got a ready passage back to King via Melbourne on the first available ketch, the Serenade.
But no, that day the storyteller and the listener were in an unlikely type of tuning, on either side of the roadside fire, as clouds went by seeking the east, and airy florets of moisture anointed them as they passed, the solid ground they were on as brief a reprieve as life itself from the sea of deeper time.
Crumbling the shortbread between my teeth I wedged the billy into the fire and said: ‘I know that bloody memorial in Murray Street. Gave me the creeps. As a kid. Gave most of the town the creeps I’d reckon. Strange things . . . often right next to where children play.’
X
Uncle Tassos wiped the slate of my education clean. He was writing a new story for me now, a true story on the slate, not with untethered colonial ideals but with the stink of death in his nostrils, the rocks and plants at his disposal.
I sat as he cooked and talked, cooked and talked, holding me to the spot even as my mind wondered about the whereabouts of the others, holding me there with his ruthless wisdom and the meat. So that those hours preceding the evacuation became a deadly conversion. And a consummation, when I finally followed Adrasteia out through the gap in the courtyard wall.
I drank the raki Tassos gave me but only in sips as he recommended. ‘There will be a time for that,’ he warned. ‘Tonight will be long whatever you choose.’
Occasionally I heard a sound over the courtyard wall, footsteps, voices, and hoped it was Vern and the others returning from their bitter shenanigans; but no, just some cat probably, a dog nudging a corpse, knocking over a pot in search of food, an ibex tiptoeing into the human habitat from the pure disorientation of cacophonous days. Each of these night sounds became like the tick of a clock, I became aware of time passing, imagining the wild fighting, or our units gathering on the headland, scanning the sea for a sign of the RN ships that were expected to bring us off.
Uncle Tassos only encouraged the flames, and his voice continued: ‘If they were promising to take you home . . . but they will take you up from here, your work half done, to some other place where people who are strangers to you like we once were will be slaughtered in their beds. If you go . . . any tears you will cry for them, or for yourself, will sting with pointlessness. Do you see?’
By midnight we were drinking coffee, for courage and energy, Tassos said, for what choices and consequences lay ahead. Still there was no sign of Vern or Mug, and between the old man’s offerings of food and advice, I began to worry.
Take a walk with my niece, into the olives. Let her be your guide.
An hour later Adrasteia and I made our departure. I followed as she got up and made for the gap in the courtyard wall.
But Uncle Tassos also rose from his stool beside the fire to stare at me as I went. And suddenly all the hurt and sadness of his world was there, in his eyes.
Adrasteia passed through but her uncle and I stood looking at each other by the gap in the wall. Black pools of sadness. Glinting in an ever deeper black. What indeed was the point of life when we are denied the opportunity to give? One stone burden to another. The things we have worked and fought so hard for are the very things we need to give away.
But this, this girl?
Her hand appeared in the gap, she took mine in hers and pulled me through into the night.
*
Adrasteia. A new moon shone on the surface of the olive leaves and on all the abandoned and busted equipment around us – the spent cutlery of war’s blood-hungry feast. As we moved through the night I was half spooked: there were trunks in shadow and the trees were like souls, writhing, twisted, tortured. Despite all that, she held my gaze. Her eyes were pale green, deep as the leaves in daylight, but flashing too like their lighter undersides in the dark breeze.
Under the canopy of the groves, deep inside the skin of the battle’s end, we walked and walked in silence through the abandoned German positions, until finally we agreed to rest under branches on a rise back from the sea. The night had grown calm, the dying breeze was a brush and the screaming sky almost a memory now in the darkness. The Stuka pilots were resting, unaware of the gnawing insecurities their victory would bring. The air felt suddenly beautiful and warm like it had in those days of butterflies before the brolly drop.
We began to talk briefly about the war but then about how she had lost her mother, and why she’d come to be living with her uncle. It was difficult with my lack of Greek but she managed to tell of how her mother had died when she was only small, how she’d never known her really, but was considered to be the image of her. She also said that with her father away on the Albanian front she was grateful to call Uncle Tassos’ her home.
As if as a consequence of the loss we shared, and the comfort it gave us, our mood lightened, we began to joke around a bit, laughing in particular about the obsession poor old Mug had had during the build-up with catching himself a fish down at the harbour. We sat in the grove, our arms occasionally touching, as we retold the story and laughed all over again at the memory of Mug’s face when he’d turned up with the fish at the villa.
Gradually the brushing of our arms, the thrill it gave, became a thing we sought, and we laughed more quietly as we began to touch, and then to kiss. It was time itself then that was evacuated as the taste of her lips lingered on my own. To my great amazement she pulled away and lifted up her blouse and there was no rigging underneath, just beautiful curving skin, and it was clear by her grin that she was proud as punch of her inheritance. She offered her nipples with cheek and an instinctual sense of carnal naturopathy. Right then they seemed like the whole point of the war.
Despite the slaughter of the previous days, and all those who’d met the most violent of ends and gone wafting up and out of their skin-cases, souls freshly released (or we’d like to think so) – despite all that, it seemed the island was not exhausted. It was a disgrace, I laughed, nothing had ever felt so easy, the ease of it was criminal. She laughed along with me, with star-bright teeth, then she sat back against the trunk of the tree and let me touch the soft muscled walls of her. I’d never known anyone so confident, so strong and open, so healthy and wet and robust. I touched her and was kissed and then we deepened again and cried together. We cried for a motherless world, the things we’d seen, for Ken Cal and all the others who’d died, the bond we felt in each other for that moment. For this uptight son of Corangamite it was some initiation. All that had been withheld from me, all that I had refused for the sake of what I thought was my duty, as son and soldier, was now offered. I groaned from the relief and the pleasure. My reedy strine was given depth. A richer note.
I had strayed. Strayed from my unit, strayed from recordable chaos into the blind reality of all unspeakable stories.
*
I don’t know how much later but delirious from her touch and not prepared to return with her to Tassos in such a ripened state I scrambled and stumbled, the taste of her in my mouth, up and away from what it seemed the earth itsel
f had just offered me. Eventually I sprung out of the groves on the west of the creekbed and onto the headland beside the town, as if someone had splashed my face with water.
Just a short time ago there’d been blokes strewn about the streets and slopes and waterfront in a celebration of disgust, Italian rifles in one hand and bottles of Cretan wine in the other, their pockets full of Fallschirmjaeger grenades and Waffen playing cards, their hearts coarsened by a need to disbelieve and discredit the evacuation orders on one hand and the emphatic beat inside their chests of all nihilisms confirmed on the other. Now there was no sign of anything, only the blue night and wreckage everywhere: army cars with their front-ends stubbed out like spent cigarettes, Bren guns akimbo in various stages of dismantling, strewn field telephones and cables lying like black spaghetti all over the place. It was as if a great arm had appeared out of the sky to backhand the lot to oblivion.
As I stumbled away from the bomb-torn town I realised the enormity of what had happened. It was in my nostrils and in the taste on my lips. I’d been left behind. I’d missed the evacuation. Drifting out onto the headland immediately below The Charlies, I sat on the rocks and began to shake, to panic. It was clear. I had passed no one, heard nothing. Everyone – Vern, Mug, my whole unit and all the others – had gone.
XI
On the day of my move, as I trudged across the island from the ten sheoaks towards Wait-a-While, a strange flock of swallows flew around me. In another mood, in another bloke, perhaps a bloke who could never, and should never be reassembled, a bloke who would sit around in a bout of coddled reckonings, as if exempt from the world’s whack, I would have guessed they were my magical consorts. But in fact I was a scarecrow barely animated, clinging to a sliver of spirit but nevertheless spilling needles of straw as I went, falling apart, any trail I was leaving resembled a nest undone.
The birds didn’t seem to notice, or if they did they didn’t seem to care. Perhaps they had come to torment me, they certainly had me ducking and flinching at times with their daredevilish skill. Regardless, they followed me all the way across, me with my sausage bag, my billy and tarp. All the way along Fraser Road they came, right along through the paperbarks into the east, then down a little dip south as the road runs next to the Fraser River, the tiny swallows proving that the cliché generated around Phar Lap, about the heart’s dimensions being a guide to loyalty and determination, was clearly bulldust. And when I got onto Wait-a-While, in a clutch of light rain passing over, they banked to the left, tight in a group towards Naracoopa, before they disappeared altogether, indistinguishable from a tiny travelling squall.
Leaving my kit to speckle and tap in the patchy showers, I walked the high clearing and down the eastern slope a way till I felt the westerly couldn’t quite get me. Further down, the grass gave way to a tangle, and gullies of wattle and gum trees continued, broken only by sideways creeks, until I reached the last stand of giant paperbarks overlooking the eastern mutton-burrowed shore and then the ocean. To the north and south of this sheltered spot the bush crept up on either side as far as the plateau, so that there was a little buffer in both of those directions as well.
That was it, I decided, and after returning for my kit I began to set up in this U-shaped clearing, with its view of Bass Strait out east over the slope-away treetop tangle. The ground wasn’t level but I would sleep with my head above my feet for once and with no sheoak counsel needed to protect me from the prevailing winds. For the time being it would do, until I got to know these acres and worked out exactly where was best to build the permanent dwelling I intended.
Of course it was a far more isolated perch than the roadside camp so the getting and storing of supplies now required more planning. I couldn’t just pad into Currie for a sausage roll whenever I felt like it. Grassy was a good ten miles south, and not an easy walk across the bush. I could fish down at Naracoopa but it was quite the climb back up, so I’d have to think it all through. Which, when I did, over the next few days of tinned beans and milkless tea, led to my decision to get my hands on a bicycle.
No doubt impressed by the way Leonie got around, it seemed the natural solution. And given that the Robinsons’ farm was not a terrible way south from Wait-a-While – a lot closer than town at least – I decided to set out there and make some inquiries.
Knowing as I do now that Brian Robinson’s late father Ray, or Doc Ray as he was known – he being the island’s doctor in his day – had chosen pedalling over galloping as his preferred mode of professional transport, this idea of mine in regards to transport seemed a little tinny. I got the whole history too, from dear old Brian, who, when all’s said and done, was a bit of an ear basher. Standing in his tractor shed beside his trusty and lean HV McKay were half-a-dozen Malvern Stars, their handlebars rust-speckled from the salt on Doc Ray’s Hippocratic travels, but four of them in perfect order. I soon learnt that the bike Leonie rode was one of the Doc’s, a fact which made me feel both connected and a little shadowed. But that’s the small circles of island life, ever decreasing, especially on King which has no upthrust of mountains to divide the population. It’s as if everyone here can see clear across to everyone else; the longer the family has been here the more braided like a mooring rope their lives will be.
The Malvern Star was a big advantage and made a significant difference to my life on Wait-a-While. Without it, I would have struggled, but with it all that I had to do seemed manageable. In the right wind I’d ride across to the Currie co-op for food and gear or down the hill here to Naracoopa to fish. The bike even had a working light – no doubt for Doc Ray’s emergency calls – so I could fish right through when the flood tide came on at dusk and have a lighted way to walk back up the owl-studded hill. I grew expert at riding one-handed with timber in my other arm as I scoured the island for suitable materials to knock up my dwelling. I moved blocks of stone for the hearth on a flat trailer I rigged up behind the bike, and roofing tin strapped crossways. All the riding was making me fitter too, my muscles having been gnawed away with all the stewing I’d been doing. I could feel the pistons of my calves expanding, and my lungs clear. And on those days when I couldn’t be bothered shovelling out the level space in the slope for the building, or getting down on my guts to scoop the rainwater and frogs out of the four-foot holes I’d dug for the uprights to be concreted into, I’d go for roaming rides up into the island’s north, exploring Wickham and scouting around some of the places Leonie had touched on in her stories: Yellow Rock, where her Uncle True lived in Old Nat and Patsy’s original house; Penny’s Lagoon; the wreck of the Neva; not so much hoping that I might bump into her but wondering when I would.
It was thanks to my new mobility that I first encountered her Uncle True, who I came across one day stogging the beach for sandworms in front of the old Fermoy house north of the river mouth at Yellow Rock. He offered me a swig from his bottle of rum, which I declined, but we did share a cigarette and a strange conversation. Indeed, Uncle True seemed a one-off, he had a certain individuality about him, though he was not exactly a beachcomber, if that implies a casual air, for he nailed me straight out for not accepting land under the SS scheme (it seemed everyone on the island knew about my business), dropping his sand pump at his feet to say that his yard up behind the house was full of the sea’s charities and that it was as much of a trick to learn how to receive as to give. He made a slurring reference then to what I must have been through as a soldier but I cut him short, and as I was pedalling away he shouted with some anxiety in his voice that if I saw Leonie I was to tell her to come and visit her uncle.
It was only a couple of hours later on that very same day, thanks again to the bike, that as a result of this request from True, I first met Lascelles. I’d pedalled upwind into Currie, ostensibly to follow a lead Brian Robinson had given me regarding flooring for my hut. Lascelles was coming out of the pub, and although he was in his civvies he caught my eye because of the mint condition slouch hat he was wearing. I
stopped in my tracks to watch him move across the road with his unusual prodding gait, until he disappeared into the co-op.
By this stage, and unbeknownst to me, Lascelles was already in the foothills of his campaign to raise funds for a putative King Island Memorial to the diggers of the war. There was a cenotaph erected near the town hall after the first war, but now with the larger settler scheme proposed for the blokes of the second, he’d had a bright idea. Not many others were that keen on his idea, only Lascelles, and I soon learnt that he was rumoured to wear the slouch to bed, in the shower, even when he was swimming! It’s awful how petty small communities can be. Anyway, he’d nearly served in New Guinea near the end of the war but had never got off the beach in North Queensland. By the seemingly untarnished nature of the illusions he got around spruiking you could have been forgiven for wishing he’d got his chance.
I had nothing against a slouch hat as such, though my own was long lost and irrelevant to me. So when Lascelles came out of the co-op again only a couple of minutes later I had no more reason than usual to be unsettled.
He spotted me leaning against the bike next to the Norfolk saplings lower on the road. So he prodded on down and introduced himself, complete with battalion number. I didn’t have to say a word in reply; he, like Uncle True and no doubt everyone else on the island, already knew who I was.
Lascelles was small, rover size I’d say, but although he whittled down in the later years of his life his frame back then was stout as a bottle-tree. He was, however, even as a younger man, always gaunt in the face, a tad concave you might say, an odd effect on a thick trunk like his but somehow symmetrical with the way his legs stabbed at the ground as he walked. Once he did arrive to shake your hand, the first thing you noticed was the way his eyes constantly darted about the place, as if he was still expecting the mortar shells he never encountered. Back then I found it bloody unnerving.